Obviously, given the sheer number of troubled borrowers (approximately 6 million currently delinquent nationwide) there are ample opportunities for mistakes to be made.
While sales of existing homes shot up across most of the nation in April, they fell in the West, down 6.2 percent.
The New Home Sales report today was nothing short of exceptional. The number beat all expectations and beat them by a lot. So are the builders back? Not so fast.
For those hoping to see the same bump up in sales and prices that the first "first-time home buyer tax credit" produced last fall, the signs are already disappointing. It's very hard to judge today's market, given how so many of the surveys and "indicators" are so far backward looking.
Today's existing home sales report should have had analysts, experts, economists, and Realtors dancing in the streets.
In 2006, the USDA program backed about 31,000 loans or $3 billion worth. In 2009, that had grown to 133,000 loans worth $16.2 billion. The good news is the standards are tight and the default rates far better than the FHA. The bad news is the program wasn't meant to handle that many loans, and it ran out of money.
What do you do when a certain economic indicator is just so far out of whack that whether the weather is cold or whether the weather is hot, we'll be bewildered whatever the weather, whether we like it or not?
Toll Brothers CEO Bob Toll was the first home builder I ever interviewed, and he was tough on me. I'll never forget standing at a J.P. Morgan housing conference in New York City, asking Mr. Toll if he thought there were any red flags in the housing market, given how fast and how high prices were rising.
Why are the permanent mods failing at all if they've barely begun, and if the front-end debt to income formula is supposedly so perfect? I asked the banking folks and expected to hear "unemployment" as the answer. I was wrong.
The Administration isn't officially considering it, maybe not "actively" considering it, not even taking a side on it per se. According to "staff" it was just a "musing."
